


A Different Life

by akraia



Category: Mr. Selfridge (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, I just really want these two to be happy ok, LeTowler baby, future fic kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 18:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3420497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akraia/pseuds/akraia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>S03E04 left me with a lot of feelings, so I came up with a version of what happens to Agnes and Henri afterwards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. New Beginnings

France treated them well.

When they stepped off the train after a long journey, the air was different, a fresh breeze carrying the scent of the sea inland. The light was different, too. They were further south than Agnes had ever been before. The way the setting sun hit the cobbled streets and the neat little houses created a picture in her head of a family having supper in their back garden after a hot summer’s day, the children in white and blue sailor outfits, flowered plates with cheese and bread on the old cast-iron table. For a moment, the familiar burst of inspiration made her forget that this wasn’t a window display that she would ever design in their studio at Selfridge’s, and a pang of sadness went through her as she remembered. But it took only one look at Henri by her side, at his drawn face with dark shadows that she had never seen there before and that didn’t belong there, to reassure her that they were doing the right thing. 

They rented a little cottage on the edge of the village from a hunchbacked old lady, who seemed content with not knowing how long they planned to stay as long as they paid their rent on time. With its chipped blue paint on the window frames, the battered stove in the kitchen and the creaking floorboards it couldn’t have been more different from the world they had left behind in London, but they both soon felt at home in it. Agnes had always dreamed of having her own garden, something that had seemed unattainable for a shop girl raised in the crowded working class areas of London. Here there were unkempt cherry and apple trees, overgrown flowerbeds and a small ragged vegetable garden right outside the back door, and the beach and the sea just a short walk from the garden fence. The sound of the ocean, growing louder and quieter with the changing tides, became their constant companion while they settled in, and it was there when they fell asleep at night. It was there, too, when the nightmares woke Henri a few hours later, gasping for air and drenched in sweat, and when they held onto each other in the dark and he tried to put into words the unmentionable horrors he had seen. 

During their first days in France they explored as if they were on holiday, strolled through the village and went on long walks through the pine forests and along the beaches that were as quiet and empty as Henri had described them. Agnes enjoyed seeing him in the places from where he had started out years ago and hearing him speak French with the locals, usually too rapidly for her to make out what he was saying. Being home seemed to do him good, even though he was still weighed down every minute of the day with what he had brought back from the war.  
He took her to see his childhood home, an impressive mansion overlooking the ocean near the edge of a cliff. The Leclairs didn’t own the house anymore; Henri’s elder brother had inherited it after their father’s death twenty years ago and sold it to a businessman from Bordeaux when he had needed the money. The new owner’s housekeeper remembered Henri’s family and let them have a look around some of the rooms and the grounds. Henri told Agnes about some fond memories he had of growing up here, but the visit didn’t seem to lift much of the weight on his shoulders. Agnes remembered his words from long ago: “There was no enchantment there, believe me.”  
He smiled when she reminded him. “There wasn’t. But it was good to come back and see it all again, when I didn’t think I would ever see any of it again.”

A young girl from the village, their new landlady’s granddaughter, helped them make the house habitable, dusting, cleaning the windows, washing curtains. Agnes soon turned to weeding the flowerbeds and growing herbs in pots on the window sill, while Henri proved surprisingly adept at repairing broken bits of furniture and replacing leaking shingles on the roof with the toolbox he borrowed from a neighbour. With time, the quiet and the sea air made the dark shadows on his face grow fainter while the sun tanned his forearms below his rolled-up shirtsleeves.  
They got better at talking to each other, an art which Agnes had almost feared they had lost after being separated for so long. Even when they had been together, a lot of their relationship had been rushed: apart from their honeymoon and a few precious days and nights, they had never really had time to nourish and cherish their relationship. But now there was no hurrying to finish urgent window displays on short notice, no reason to hide anything from ill-disposed eyes or ears on the shop floor. Henri still didn’t like to discuss the war; he never would. But having time to be alone with one another brought them closer together, and it was reassuring to know that they could be enough for each other without a busy store and a bustling city surrounding them.

Their first summer in France seemed endless, but it wasn’t, and as it turned into autumn, temporary arrangements grew into permanent ones. After intense discussions, their landlady agreed to have the draughty kitchen window replaced before the winter gales began. The last trunks with the remainder of their belongings were sent from London and were delivered to their house by a bewildered postman with the help of the station manager’s horse and cart. Julie, their landlady’s granddaughter, was taken on permanently and came over most days to do the washing and the cleaning. There wasn’t much designing to be done in the village, but they had to make a living somehow, so Agnes got a job in the local school teaching children drawing and a bit of English. Henri charmed the local photographer into giving him work by means of his knowledge of cameras and picture composition and the best bunch of apples from Agnes’ garden. In many respects, it was a far cry from the work they had done at Selfridge’s, but Agnes enjoyed working with the kids, and photographing wedding parties and villages fetes got Henri out of the house and among people. As people in the village got to know the slightly eccentric and artistic Monsieur Leclair and his no less eccentric and artistic English wife, they started being invited to birthday celebrations and choir practices and dinner parties. Agnes and Henri had never really talked about how long they would stay here, but it seemed that they were putting down roots almost involuntarily. 

One rainy Sunday afternoon in late autumn they were sitting in their living room, when she slowly lowered the sketch-pad she was scribbling on and looked at the fire crackling in the fireplace, the raindrops running down the window pane and Henri sitting in the chair opposite her, going through some photographs and absent-mindedly stroking her feet that were resting in his lap.  
“You know something?”  
He looked up from his work.  
“What?”  
“I think I could stay here for a while.”  
His smile crinkled the skin around his eyes.  
“Me too.”


	2. War Wounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Leclairs talk about the war.  
> Warning: mention of suicide (not graphic)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More adventures in France (and I use the term "adventures" very loosely)! I have now done more research about the French military in WWI than I ever cared to do.

Agnes doesn’t know what has woken her. Eyes closed, she lies still on her back and listens for the familiar background noises of the early morning: the rushing of the near ocean, carrying into the bedroom through the open window; a gentle wind whispering in the leaves of the trees outside; the occasional creak of the aged walls surrounding her. They are sounds that she has come to know by heart during the last few weeks, and listening to them calms her in much the same way that her mother’s low murmur from the next room or the lone clicking of the hooves of the milkman’s horse down on the street have done when she was a child. 

But now, something in the assortment of noises is missing. Agnes’ brow furrows: the quiet even sounds of Henri’s breathing next to her aren’t there. Upon opening her eyes she discovers that his side of the bed is empty, and her frown deepens. She listens intently. But there are no squeaking floorboards, no rustle of turning book leaves, no sign whatsoever to indicate that anyone is in the house but her. In the pale morning light trickling in between the curtains she can make out the clock on the bedside table: half past five. It isn’t like Henri to get up this early, and his bed sheets are already cold to the touch. 

Agnes sits up in bed, suddenly wide awake, worry rising in her chest. Where is he? He has had trouble sleeping ever since he came back from the war, but he usually doesn’t just vanish like this. Agnes knows the stories, from George’s letters and snatches of hushed conversations in the village, of men returning from war outwardly unwounded who are later found drowned in a lake or hanged from a roof beam. She doesn’t really consider this to be a real possibility for Henri, but she can’t shake the thought, so she gets out of bed, pulls on her dressing gown and goes to look for him. 

The house is empty, just as she has suspected, and so is the garden, judging from the view from the kitchen window. There is an empty water glass on the kitchen table, however, that wasn’t there when she went to bed last night. Decisively, she slips into her shoes and steps out into the cool morning. Even though it is June, the sky is drab and cloudy when she emerges from the small wood that separates their house from the dunes.

Her heartbeat finally slows down when she spots Henri sitting on the beach, hugging his knees and looking out towards the churning sea. He doesn’t notice her until she is just a few feet away, and when he does, the distant look on his face tells her that he has been miles away, closer to the far off horizon than to her. 

“Here you are”, she says softly and sits down next to him. 

His eyes flicker towards her, but return into the distance after a moment.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

She studies his tired eyes, the dark stubble on his cheeks, his hunched shoulders. He appears to have slipped on yesterday’s clothes in a hurry, braces askew, buttons done up in the wrong button holes, his bare feet digging into the damp sand.

“Aren’t you cold?”

After a pause, as though her words take some time to reach him, he shakes his head. 

“No.” 

Another moment passes, then he sighs, rubs his eyes and finally looks at her, making a visible effort to pull himself together. He even manages to crack a little smile when he notices her get-up.

“You’ll be shaking sand out of your nightdress for days.”

The smile comes as a relief, but she doesn’t want to see him putting on a brave face for her benefit. If this is going to work, they both have to try, really try. A lot of the time, Agnes has to remind herself that he, too, is still learning how to live with his new self. 

“Why couldn’t you sleep?”

His body tenses up next to her, his usual reaction to being confronted with what he doesn’t want to talk about. Talking to Henri can be a bit like trying to win the affections of a stray cat: act too cautiously and it will ignore you, urge too much and it will run away.

“It’s always worse at night,” he says after a while, his eyes fixed on the horizon again, “sometimes I wake up and you’re asleep and everything is quiet and peaceful. But none of it seems real. It comes back to me.” 

She knows he won’t go on unless she nudges him a little, so she asks, as gently as she can: “What comes back to you?”

When he finally speaks, his voice is different, unstable, almost on the verge of crumbling.

“We used to be in the trenches for a week at a time, up to the knees in mud. Rats everywhere. Artillery fire all around. Some weeks, we would lose so many men. Some of them were children, eighteen, nineteen. When they died, more followed. In my head, I’m back there. Suddenly the room feels smaller. It’s like the air just…goes away. I need to get out.” 

Agnes still doesn’t know a lot about his time in the war, apart from his rank and the names of some of the places he has fought at and that she has looked up on a faded old map: Verdun, Artois, Chemin des Dames. She wants him to tell her more because she needs to understand, but nevertheless she always has to fight the urge to stick her fingers into her ears when he does. The more she learns, the more incredible it seems to her that anyone can experience anything like this and come back from it.

“Does coming here help?” 

He clears his throat, now staring at his knees. 

“Sometimes it does. There’s more space. More air. It gives you perspective.”

There is a pause; she can almost hear him looking for words.

“War starts with all these reasons, but once you’re caught up in it, there are no reasons. There’s no reason why one man goes mad with shell shock and another doesn’t. There’s no reason why the grenade hits the boy next to you instead of you. You get used to living like that, in a way. And when the war is over and you’re still there, you need to find reasons again.”

“And are you? Finding reasons?”

“I think so.”

When he finally looks at her again, there is the hint of a spark in his eyes that she hasn’t seen there a lot lately.

“You’re one.”

This time Agnes can return the smile, despite the lump rising in her throat. She leans in to rest her head on his shoulder. 

“I got scared, when I woke up and you were gone.”

She feels him put his arm around her, his breath brushing her forehead as he speaks.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I know you didn’t. It’s just, a note would be nice. For future reference.”

“I’ll remember.”


	3. The Height of Summer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This has been sitting in my "abandoned bits of fic" folder for absolutely ages, and I finally sucked it up and finished it. Enjoy some shameless family fluff!

_August 1925_

The stretch of land along the Atlantic coast is sweating in the summer heat. In the beach resorts further south the children of holiday-making families are splashing in the waves, the wealthier ones being chased by nannies with parasols while the parents sit in the shade chatting and treating themselves to an early aperitif.

In the village, however, hardly anybody goes on holiday, so life continues much the same as the rest of the year, apart from the extended lunch breaks that everybody from the doctor to the fishermen uses to take naps in the shade. Henri has been envying them all afternoon while he has been developing family portraits and souvenir photos in the stuffiest sweatiest darkroom in all of France, but his plans for this evening demand that he finishes work on time, a feat that is accomplished when he shuts the door of his photography business behind himself shortly after five.

On his short walk home, Henri encounters no one, but the world is slowly waking up from its heat-induced stupor. The signs are there for anyone who can read them: faint sleepy voices escaping from an open bedroom window, the sound of shutters being tentatively pushed open, a skinny orange cat emerging from its shady hideaway beneath some shrubs. With every minute the heat seems to become a fraction less sweltering, and the prospect of a cooling evening breeze banishes most of the drowsiness that Henri has felt creeping up on him all afternoon. When he turns the last corner and the house comes into view, his eyes are so accustomed to the bright sunlight that he only spots the small figure on the garden fence after a moment, legs dangling, sitting as close to the edge of the shade as the stern instruction “Don’t go into the sun” will allow. There is a delighted squeak, the scrunching of sandals running up the dusty path, and an excited four-year-old flinging herself into Henri’s arms.

“Now, what’s this? I didn’t realise we had a guard dog!”

Béatrice rolls her eyes.

“I’m not a dog, Papa, I’m a _girl_!”

“Oh! My mistake. Is this not a dog snout, then?”

He gently pinches her nose and she giggles, her light brown hair bouncing. It takes exactly five seconds for her to get to the topic that really interests her.

“Can we go to the beach now? Mummy said we can go to the beach when you’re home,” she says emphatically as Henri carries her up the garden path to the front door, standing wide open to catch any breeze that might relieve the heat.

“We can go when we’re all ready to go. When I’ve changed and your mother is ready and we have everything that we need to take with us”, he adds for good measure because he is well acquainted with Béatrice’s scarce patience. Her enthusiasm isn’t about to be reigned in, though.

“Can we play ball? Can I build a sandcastle?”

Henri sends her off to look for her bucket and spade in the back garden. The window in the living room is open, the shutters halfway closed, the air still but not stuffy. He finds Agnes lying on the sofa fast asleep with her bare legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, one arm pillowing her head. She looks so peaceful that Henri almost doesn’t want to disturb her, but he can’t resist crouching down and pressing a kiss to her cheek. She wakes up with a confused smile.

“You’re home”, she says, her voice husky with sleep.

He props up his chin on his arm.

“I am.”

“I meant to just put my feet up for five minutes, but I must have fallen asleep. Did Béa wait for you in the garden?”

“Sitting on the fence. She really wants to go to the beach.”

Agnes stretches, her arms reaching back until her fingertips brush against the wall. She rolls her eyes.

“Yes, now that you mention it, she might have said so fifty or sixty times since this morning.”

There's noise from the back of the house: Béatrice rooting around for her beach toys amongst the rakes and shovels by the back door, singing _Frère Jacques_ loudly and a little bit flat.

Agnes and Henri listen for a moment and can't help grinning at each other when their eyes meet. Then Agnes sits up straight, heaving a sigh.

“All right, then.”

She moves to swing her legs off the sofa, but stops and screws up her face.

Henri frowns. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Dizzy.”

He watches her closely to make sure it is “nothing”, but when she opens her eyes again they are bright and clear – if a little sleepy – and she smiles when she notices his look.

“Don't worry, I just sat up too quickly. It's the heat.”

“So it is.”

He reaches out to tuck a curl of her hair back behind her ear.

“I'm sure it will be cooler on the beach later.”

“I can hardly wait.”

 

By the time they have gathered everything they need – Béatrice's ball, bucket and spade, a blanket, jackets in case it gets cool later, the picnic basket with their dinner – it is late enough that the sun is slowly tilting towards the horizon and that the short walk from their house to the beach doesn't make them sweat buckets. Béatrice skips ahead of them the whole way. She doesn't seem to stop moving at all, collecting shells in the apron of her hitched-up skirt, running away from the waves shrieking and laughing, announcing she is going to dig a hole so deep she can stand up in it, “and not see your feet, Papa!”

It is mostly Henri's domain to chase after her and to make sure that she doesn't either drown, get lost or get buried under a mountain of dug up sand, while Agnes watches them from her perch on the picnic blanket.

“I’m getting too old to chase after a small child”, he says when he collapses next to Agnes on the ground.

She leans over to him and pops a grape into his open mouth.

“That's unfortunate since you’ll have another one to chase after in a few weeks' time.”

He smiles at her, chewing, and lays a palm against her belly, round under the light fabric of her summer dress. She gives him a grin in answer, before shielding her eyes to look out on the beach against the sun.

“Béa! Do you want that piece of quiche I kept for you from lunch?”

A few moments later, Béatrice lands on the picnic blanket, with a piece of seaweed in her hair and sand trickling out of the folds of her dress. She holds still long enough to demolish her dinner, then takes off again: “Come on, Papa! We'll build a sandcastle! A big one!”

Her parents look after her, then Henri gets to his feet with a groan.

“I'd better be off.”

Agnes flashes him a grin.

“Don't you feel lucky.”

He glances down at her, then over his shoulder towards their daughter. He bends down to Agnes to give her a kiss, his back only slightly complaining.

“Oh, my love. I absolutely do.”

 

 


End file.
